Denver Nuggets JaVale McGee (34) looks down at Masai Ujiri, Denver Nuggets General Manager and Ty Lawson as they pose for portraits during Media Day at Pepsi Monday, October 1, 2012 at Pepsi Center. The team also unveiled their new alternate uniform. John Leyba, The Denver Post

Enough with the extreme makeovers and locker-room headaches. Isn’t it about time the Nuggets make big noise in the NBA playoffs rather than big news in the trade market?

You can count on Denver reaching the playoffs for the 10th consecutive season. But the goal should be loftier. If this franchise wants to avoid elimination in the opening round for only the second time since 2004, let’s remove the revolving door in the locker room. At this point, maybe what coach George Karl needs more than fresh talent is roster stability.

“We put our coach through (heck) the last two years with all the change,” Nuggets general manager Masai Ujiri told me. “I can go hide in my office after a trade, but (Karl) has to deal with it on the court every single day. It’s not easy to put that kind of stress on a coach. Building a team takes time. Hopefully now we can grow.”

Two seasons ago, the top item on forward Carmelo Anthony’s honeymoon list was to get out of Denver.

Last season, the Nuggets gave center Nene a fat contract, then almost immediately came down with a bad case of buyer’s remorse.

The peace of this summer was broken with a blockbuster trade that brought the Nuggets defensive stalwart Andre Iguodala, but only after packing up the sneakers to ship out starter Arron Afflalo and key reserve Al Harrington.

Notice a trend?

Without question the front office has performed magic on the fly to remake the roster and keep winning.

But there has been too much upheaval in the Denver dressing room for the Nuggets to get on a serious playoff roll.

“The change was definitely hard. You go from seeing all your teammates in the locker room to the next day, and the names are gone, the jerseys are gone and there are empty chairs. It’s crazy. I was sad when the trades went down,” Nuggets guard Ty Lawson said.

The NBA can be a cruel, cold business. Sure, players are paid handsomely to be professional. But millionaires are human beings too. Change is unsettling to most folks. Chemistry doesn’t happen overnight. Recalling the trade of Melo, who was his favorite star in the league, Lawson said: “Honestly, it scared me, because I didn’t know what kind of team we were going to be.”

Denver has a team Karl professes to love.

So would it be too much to ask for Ujiri to stop tinkering with it for five minutes?

Crazy as it seems, the Nuggets do not think they’re doomed to play for third place in the conference. They refuse to believe it’s impossible to compete with Oklahoma City or the Los Angeles Lakers. “We’re going to be tough to beat,” Lawson said.

When the Nuggets unveiled their new uniforms this week, a door swung open in the Pepsi Center to reveal a bigger explosion of yellow than all the sunflowers in Vincent van Gogh’s garden.

Bashful teammates pushed Lawson toward the stage, where he led a parade of reluctant runway models that included Iguodala, Danilo Gallinari, JaVale McGee and Kenneth Faried.

To tell the truth, they looked like five guys dressed up as Big Bird for Halloween.

But so long as none of them wants out of the uniform or out of town before the trade deadline, maybe Denver can actually win a playoff series and make Lawson’s wild ambition of becoming the best team in the West sound like something more than a crazy dream.

“Now that we know what our core is going to be for the next couple years, so we can build and grow together,” Lawson said. “It’s better for our mentality and it gives us more stability as a team.”

For the Nuggets to be something more than the NBA’s most colorful sideshow, they have to give peace a chance.

MONTREAL — It’s a big deal to play or coach hockey in Montreal and Toronto, and for first-year Avalanche coach Jared Bednar, it’s bound to be extra special because it will be his first time in those historic Original Six markets. Indeed, the Canadian native from Yorkton, Saskatchewan, has never been to the Bell Centre or Air Canada Centre — where...

Shortly before the season began, Holmes, who had been dealing with a nagging hip since September, finally went in to get an X-ray to get the injury addressed. That X-ray revealed a mass on his hip, and following a biopsy, doctors diagnosed Holmes with Osteosarcoma.